In The Making of Incarnation, there’s a group of motion capture technicians attempting to map all motion and extrapolate their knowledge to help prepare a science fiction film that culminates with a (hopefully) realistic depiction of a spaceship imploding and exploding at the same time. McCarthy presents scenes from the movie, with its own unique vocabulary and esoteric lore, reading somewhat like the William Gibson classic Neuromancer, and does indeed culminate with the ship’s implo-explosion, which is presented with a pretty visceral and moving sequence. At the same time, there are patentees trying to lay claim to particular motions and a set of boxes of notes and journals and letters exchanged between physicists, alluding to a missing box, 808, that “changes everything.” Characters are searching for the elusive box and conspiracy is afoot, though that aspect of the book arguably takes a back seat to its other reflections.
I have to say, this entry to McCarthy’s oeuvre is beyond me and I found myself largely disinvested, sometimes outright waiting for the book to end. It has flashes of glory, but the overall narrative fails to feel cohesive. With the exception of Mark Phocan, the characters feel like empty names bumping around. I guess that goes with the territory of writing a book about the ever-expanding potential of different motions and velocities (think Deleuze and Guattari’s work in A Thousand Plateaus). We lose sight of the individual dramas in light of the ‘big picture.’
I reserve Mark Phocan as a character with personality mainly due to one of the opening scenes of the book, in which he attends an art gallery on a field trip as a child. The writing of childhood rings mostly true, if a little elevated. There’s a scene where young Mark is struck (keep that word in mind) by a painting depicting a bird just– or about-to-be—struck by a stone hurtling through the air. Mark finds himself unable to turn away from the image, sensing that somehow the bird is willing the rock to strike it, recognizing that the two forces are bound up together. The drama of the rudimentary painting feels profound and it gives insight into Mark that he’s obsessed by the image. When he is confronted by a peer for his embarrassing investment in the image, he hurls an object at the painting, which hits its, seems to hang in the balance, and then fall to the ground. Mark is swept away to the security offices and watches the images of him-but-not-him repeating the throwing motion. It’s a vocational genesis story as good as any.
But then we abandon, for the most part, character. Instead, the novel focuses on different aspects of motion and physics. The flashes of brilliance in the book present themselves as questionable implications. We work from the premise that forces are bound up together—well, where does that end?
In one scene, there’s a discussion of patenting motion. It’s presented in terms of dance. A choreographed dance can be said to be a complete artwork that ought not be plagiarized. But, are the individual motions of the dance proprietary? Where does that line end? Another example is the idea of swiping up on your phone to reveal more content. The technology of the phone is patented, but the user’s motion is required to access it. Rather than patenting the phone’s technology, this company is looking into the possibility of patenting the swiping motion itself—each component of the symbiotic relationship proprietary. It’s absurd, but an engaging vehicle for questions of what constitutes an individual unit.
Much later in the book, supplemented with scientific jargon, there’s a discussion of how to isolate variables in a sequence of motions. Operating from the premise that everything is connected, the limits of the premise quickly expose themselves—or rather, don’t. This time, McCarthy philosophizes with sport as a backdrop. If people were trying to optimize player performances, they would need to consider any number of factors. Say you want to replicate a home run motion every time the player is at bat. Well, you’d have to take account of the pitch, of course, but also the player’s level of energy, how many carbs did they eat at lunch before the game, how many times they practice swinging the bat, how many times the bat got used, how many times the ball has been hit, and any number of minutiae that impact the supposedly singular motion. The characters discuss the idea of itemizing everything in a sequence and sub-sequences, looking for isolatable commonalities. The effect is to create a sense that everything is both predictable and completely unique. To determine every factor that impacts an individual motion would require nothing short of omniscience and would result in nothing short of pure determinism for every individual action in the universe.
Of course, we can’t account for all motion without also considering time. Time is what makes things irreplicable—okay, I might be anticipating one of my future reviews a bit about On the Weirdness of the World. In any case, in McCarthy’s text, there’s a theory towards the end of the book that is explored and then refuted of sound being stored in material. For instance, we’d be able to extract the sound of, say, Socrates, by having hyperreceptive technology that could measure sound lingering in the stone of the Acropolis. It’s an extension of the idea that every action has an impact and that if we could measure the actions minutely enough we could replicate everything that has happened in a place, including sound. This fragment appears to be a holdover from McCarthy’s other book, C, which explored that idea in much more depth. It’s intriguing to me that it is dismissed out of hand here.
The book’s conspiratorial mode would otherwise be engaging, but the pacing is so disrupted by the lengthy discussions. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the philosophizing. The scientific jargon I could take or leave (preferably the later). I like the idea of searching for a mysterious box that “changes everything”, but no one of these elements operated distinctly enough to warrant my adoration. I think there are moments that are meant to be funny, but there’s so much distance tonally and temporally between the setup and punchline that it’s hard to tell. For instance, in one of the scenes, the filmmakers are supposed to destroy a plane and there’s a lot riding on it. They seem to mess up the physics and the plane does, sort of, get destroyed by not materializing at all. Maybe existing in some other dimension? One of the employees carries the secret of the failure, fearing repercussions, and the scene feels like an absurd twist of fate that deflates the supposed prowess of these physicists. Similarly, the secret of “box 808” is continually shrouded by government regulations and the like. By the end of the book, I was paying very little attention and it seems like maybe the secret of box 808 was that it was actually not about the big picture of physics but instead something more intensely personal. If I’ve interpreted things correctly (which is already doubtful), a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy has “changed everything” in the relationship between the physicists exchanging letters and the fact that box 808 “changes everything” is an error, or at least an irreplicable inference of someone being inspired to write and only having the papers in box 808 at the ready for an immediate note-taking reflection. The moment felt deflating. I suppose it’s in line with everything being connected—Dante’s Inferno is as connected to the sequence that would explain the super theory of everything. But, there’s so much distance that it fails to feel relevant for any kind of main idea. Everything is connected, but nothing touches.
All things considered, I’m maybe not being very generous in my review because I’m an inept reader. If I had taken more care, perhaps the book would have registered with me more. As it is, McCarthy’s Remainder is one of the most memorable and impactful books I’ve read, and I have fond memories of Satin Island, but The Making of Incarnation just felt a bit too beyond my reach.
Nonetheless, happy reading.
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